Cambridge Neighbors (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) eBook

He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with
a vivid touch on his listener’s shoulder:
“Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy
it. It’s the only one you’ve got,
or ever will have.” This light and joyous
creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins,
and I need not say that I never met him in any of
the great Cambridge houses. I am not sure that
he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for
Keeler was framed rather for men’s liking, and
Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to whether
his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat
to infect his manner. Keeler was too really modest
to be of any rebellious mind towards the society which
ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to be
greatly vexed by it. He lived on in the house
of a suave old actor, who oddly made his home in Cambridge,
and he continued of a harmless Bohemianism in his
daily walk, which included lunches at Boston restaurants
as often as he could get you to let him give them you,
if you were of his acquaintance. On a Sunday
he would appear coming out of the post-office usually
at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming
for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout
a blithe salutation to the friend he had marked for
his companion in a morning stroll. The stroll
was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do
not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the
beat of the better element) and the talk was mainly
of literature, in which he was doing less than he
meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to
feel was not a branch of the Show Business, and might
not be legitimately worked by like advertising, though
he truly loved and honored it.

I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and
Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which
showed their shadows in his smiling face. He
was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands
and feet of almost womanish littleness. He was
very blonde, and his restless eyes were blue; he wore
his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled
nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much
as he wished.

VIII.

Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge
when I first came there an Indianian, more accepted
by literary society, who was of real quality as a
poet. Forceythe Willson, whose poem of “The
Old Sergeant” Doctor Holmes used to read publicly
in the closing year of the civil war, was of a Western
altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary beauty
of face in an oriental sort. He had large, dark
eyes with clouded whites; his full, silken beard was
of a flashing Persian blackness. He was excessively
nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him
at Longfellow’s, he could not hold himself still
in his chair. I think this was an effect of shyness
in him, as well as physical, for afterwards when I
went to find him in his own house he was much more
at ease.